A minor MODx annoyance when using It's All Text

I have a minor but vexing gripe about the MODx manager and its relationship with It’s All Text (which I of course realize is its own project and outside the pervue of the MODx team). The cause of this issue goes a bit deeper and I think it might be worth an improvement request if others agree.

When I open a resource for editing, take it directly to It’s All Text, make changes and return to save them in MODx, the Save button is disabled. Why? MODx apparently doesn’t realize that the text has changed. I have to do something silly like deleting a letter and adding it back before the Manager will let me save.

Unless there’s some profound programming reason why this won’t work, I think you ought to be able to save a resource anytime you want, even if you haven’t changed anything at all.

???

It’s a tough call. Having the Save button disabled tells you that you haven’t modified anything (and makes it possible to warn users that they are leaving a page without saving it).

Since It’s All Text is outside of MODx, MODx has no easy way of telling that the field has been modified since no keypress events have occurred inside MODx. I’m not sure how the dirty flag is currently set, so it might be possible to detect it, but that would waste resources for everyone you doesn’t use It’s All Text.

You could certainly file it as a feature request.

Or, better yet, you could develop a first-class code editor plugin for MODx.

BTW, have you tried CodeMirror?

Quote from: BobRay at Dec 10, 2010, 05:16 PM

BTW, have you tried CodeMirror?

CodeMirror is getting there, but as far as I know you still can’t use it to edit resources, only elements. Additionally, its indenting behavior is unpredictable and results in very ugly code, at least for me.

Not ragging on the developer at all, that’s just how I feel about it in its current state.

There are some options here http://codemirror.net/manual.html, although I don’t see much on controlling the style of the code formatting.

You’re right about it not working on Resources, however, and I stopped using it when it inserted phantom parentheses in the code that caused a PHP error but didn’t appear in the editor (though I could see them in the cache).

Good link to have anyway - thanks.

You can use CTRL+ALT+S shortcut to save the doc. (works on Windows)

Not a solution, but ....

Quote from: zi at Dec 10, 2010, 05:42 PM

You can use CTRL+ALT+S shortcut to save the doc. (works on Windows)

Not a solution, but ....

Maybe I’m missing something, but that sure looks like a solution to me. You have made my day, zi! This not only resolves the issue about which I originally posted, it fixes another annoyance I didn’t mention - the lack of a keyboard shortcut to save.

You’re my hero!

Yes, thank Zi, I use to do a space-backspace routine to solve the problem...
but this is much better!

Glad it helped!

Thanks to Shaun for putting them in.